Technology / Research & Development

Clarification

People sometimes mistake The Puzzle School for an online learning effort or
a school where the curriculum would be primarily through online resources.

In reality The Puzzle School seeks to be a physical school that offers students
a wide range of experiences. We are trying to create a school where students have
greater ownership over their environment and education, where they develop meaningful
relationships with teachers and mentors, and where they have time
to explore their interests and engage in a wide range of studies, projects, and real
world experiences such as internships.

The primary puzzle will be how we can piece everything together, from programs
to technology to community resources in a flexible and responsive manner to best
serve the needs of each individual student.

Technology will play a role in supporting this vision, but it is far from the only concern.

Infrastructure

The following websites have been developed to help with infrastructural challenges
at The Puzzle School, including better communication between students, teachers,
and parents as well as better ways of connecting with the community and exploring
student interests.

EdContext

We've partnered up with Jack Schneider, an assistant professor at Holy Cross and
the Director of Research with the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment
to build a text-messaging service that will allow The Puzzle School (and other schools) to
collect feedback from students, parents, and teachers throughout the year on a wide-ranging
set of questions about their experiences with the school.

We believe this will help The Puzzle School (and other schools) more effectively listen to
everyone involved in the school, helping to ensure that the loudest voices are not the only
opinions considered. We hope the EdContext tool can help foster a more supportive, communicative,
and involved community by collecting feedback from everyone in the community and making that
feedback, aggregated to protect privacy, available for everyone else to see and act on.

Status:
Initial pilots in Cambridge and Somerville Public Schools

ThoughtfulRecommendations

The primary goal of ThoughtfulRecommendations is to provide students with more visibility
into the interests, hobbies, and passions of the teachers at The Puzzle School and other
adult mentors in the community. The website makes it easy for someone to create a profile
and list out everything they've discovered in the world that they really appreciate, that
they would recommend to just about anyone. When you list something you also provide
a "thoughtful recommendation", so there's a description of why you would recommend it.

This allows students to discover fascinating resources and experiences that their teachers
and other adults in their life really appreciate. It also allows students to get a more
intimate idea of who the adults in their life are and how complex their interests and lives
may be. They may even discover that they share some interests and then the student can
explore the recommendations or even connect with the teacher around that interest.

Students could also create profiles for themselves, building up a list of high quality
resources along with thoughtful recommendations about each one. This could help a student
share their observations about the world around them and their interests with
teachers, colleges, and future employers.

Curriculum

The following projects are explorations around creating high quality resources that
support students in their learning through the puzzle-solving process that The Puzzle
School is built around. Each resource is designed to be interactive, iterative, and
scaffolded with high quality feedback loops.

Again it should be stressed that these projects would not be the only learning resources
used in The Puzzle School. They simply represent our ongoing exploration around creating
high quality
programs
and resources to support students in diverse learning pathways.

The Code Puzzle

The Code Puzzle is a "learn to code" activity involving physical cards you can print
out and a free app for iPhones and iPads.

You arrange the cards and write in parameters to create a program. Then you photograph
the cards with the app and it will scan them and execute your program.

Circuitous

Circuitous is a fully functional circuit simulator. We've layered on top
a series of challenges that people can help direct a student's learning,
but students can simply play around with the simulator as well.

Each challenge has a series of hints, an example solution, and a video
explanation of the challenge and solution.

XYFlyer

XYFlyer is a simple puzzle app that provides a series of challenges around constructing
equations. With each equation constructed you can immediately see the resulting graph and
how different changes to each equation affect the graph.

We've created over 200 levels that get more and more challenging.
They can help students gain a better visual intuition about how equations graph out.

Drawing In Code

The Puzzle School is collaborating with David Ng, the founder of
Vertical Learning Labs, to develop an
online resource designed to support an exploration of artistic observation and computational thinking.
Essentially students will learn how to teach a computer to draw and design games. We are currently
using the resource as one pathway for students to explore in our
programs.

Through a series of challenges students will develop their ability to observe their physical world
and translate that into code so that a computer can draw it. From there students
will be able to animate their drawing and make them interactive (games).

Drawing In Code is still in development. The eventual goal is to support students toward projects of
their own design that can then be shared with friends and family.

Peanutty

Peanutty provides an interesting physics-based puzzle-solving environment where you can interact
with a challenge by dragging, dropping, and drawing, and, with each interaction
code is generated. Then you can edit the code to affect the interaction.

Drop a ball and then change the dimensions of the ball to be much bigger and watch it drop again.
Develop creative solutions to puzzles and then develop your own puzzles by tweaking or rewriting
the level code.

Code Puzzles

Code Puzzles provides a series of puzzles that can help you learn how to code.

Each puzzle has a lesson and hints to provide guidance, but you can also just
mess around with the code and see what the results are. A number of lesson
paths have been provided as well, such as creating a calculator in javascript.

Light It Up

We wanted to create puzzles that would teach students fractions more directly, so we reduced the number of obstacles in our levels, making the puzzles more about the fractions than the obstacles.

We created a level editor that allows teachers to easily create custom levels to teach a specific fraction-based idea. The level editor also allows students to create their own puzzles, improving their mastery of fractions while creating puzzles as well as solving puzzles.

We wanted to add in a feature that would walk you through the solution to the puzzle if you got stuck. We wanted to make the game more about learning then about solving the puzzles, so we focused on creating more levels with the ability to get help on any level that is too hard.

“So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves:
historical research is wildly seductive and fun.
There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing
together details like a puzzle.”

~ Nancy Horan

“As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band.
Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and
just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it.
I think it was an escape for me.”

~ Michael J. Fox

“When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile
of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books
and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.”

~ Janine di Giovanni

“I tell people all the time, as I was going through my process of being a
comedian or being an actor and a writer at 'SNL,'
I tell people that everything you do is all a piece of your puzzle to
determine where you're going to end up at.”

~ J. B. Smoove

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* The Puzzle School does not and shall not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status, in any of its activities or operations. These activities include, but are not limited to, hiring and firing of staff, selection of volunteers and vendors, and provision of services. We are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all members of our staff, clients, volunteers, subcontractors, vendors, and clients.

* The Puzzle School is an equal opportunity employer. We will not discriminate and will take affirmative action measures to ensure against discrimination in employment, recruitment, advertisements for employment, compensation, termination, upgrading, promotions, and other conditions of employment against any employee or job applicant on the bases of race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, creed, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.